Climate

Haven Energy lands $7M Series A 9 months after its seed round

Comment

Two Tesla Powerwalls sit on the outside of a house.
Image Credits: RoschetzkyIstockPhoto / Getty Images

The residential solar industry has been a victim of its own success.

People across the country have raced to install solar panels to take advantage of generous net metering rates, where utilities pay people a premium for their power. Meanwhile, big power producers have found themselves forced to shut off at what used to be peak (and profitable) times.

In California, the problem was particularly pronounced. When solar started hitting the mainstream, the state’s grid operator began noticing that as more people connected solar panels, the load on the grid would dip midday. Over the past 15 years, the dip has deepened. Since grids work best when the load on them is smooth, regulators began to mull how to pull it back up.

So, a little over a year ago, the California Public Utilities Commission changed how much utilities had to pay for power from new installations for single-family homeowners. Last month, it did the same for multifamily and commercial buildings. For existing solar arrays, the new rates would be phased in over 20 years. There was a silver lining, though: an incentive for home or building owners to install batteries alongside solar panels. That way they could make use of their panels’ production at night, too.

For new solar installations, adding a battery isn’t trivial, but it isn’t complicated, either. But for people who already have solar panels, adding a battery is more challenging because of the economics. Solar companies install the bulk of residential and small commercial batteries, but a battery installation without solar isn’t big enough for them to be interested.

Which is how Haven Energy got started: Two of the company’s founders, both Casper alumni, had tried for years to get batteries for their homes installed. When they couldn’t, they set out to fix the problem via entrepreneurship.

In a bit of auspicious timing, Haven Energy launched in April 2023 just as California’s new rules for single-family homes were taking effect. The startup hit the ground running with a $4.2 million seed round to build a B2B2C platform connecting homeowners with contractors to a battery to their existing solar setup.

Now, nine months later, the company is back with more news: a $7 million Series A and a new emphasis on building a platform for installers, TechCrunch+ has exclusively learned. Lerer Hippeau, Giant Ventures, and Raven One Ventures returned, and they were joined by Comcast Ventures, LifeX, TO VC, and Habitat Partners.

Despite fundraising pressures elsewhere, the Haven team felt the timing was right. “We’ve had this general thesis that there’s a lot of unmet demand from homeowners for adding batteries. I think we’re seeing that in spades,” Haven CEO Vinnie Campo told TechCrunch+.

At launch, Campo and the team figured they could use an off-the-shelf piece of software to get the installer side of the business up and running, something like Aurora Solar, which many solar installers use to design and manage their jobs. But, Campo said, they quickly realized that nothing like that existed for battery installations. “We had to go back and build all that software ourselves.”

Haven’s software provides installers with plans and permit details as well as what’s needed to complete interconnection with the grid. The company handles procurement, too.

“We now handle all of that for them,” Campo said. “They get to show up on installation day with plant sets ready, the batteries already waiting for them, and they can just do the installation.”

The startup charges homeowners a fixed price that covers a typical scope of work. Most of its contractor-side customers are smaller electricians for whom this is often a new line of business.

Currently, Haven works with installers in Los Angeles and parts of the northern Bay Area. As it grows, it’s looking to expand the territories it serves, including all of California soon and new states later this year. Campo said his company is also keeping an eye on the emerging vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home space, two technologies that allow electric vehicles to serve as a home’s backup battery.

For homeowners, Haven also rolled out a virtual power plant program, allowing them to participate in so-called demand-response events in which grid operators pay a premium for electricity during periods of high demand. The company passes on a portion of those payments at the end of the year.

Haven now has 15 people on staff, up from five at launch, and its business doubled between the third and fourth quarters. Campo doesn’t see it slowing down. “There’s just like such a massive runway on batteries,” he said.

More TechCrunch

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

14 hours ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

15 hours ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android